Out and about in the Galilee

Another two days of excitement! We have been driving up and down the lower Galilee in our scruffy Fiat, which has the pick-up and suspension of a low-end go-cart. It's teeny, which is a great help for parking, but really struggles to go up the hills:

Here's the sad part of the story: Bob grew up speaking Yiddish at home, learned some Russian along the way when he was young, and studied Hebrew for a couple of years for his Bar Mitzvah. So here in Haifa, he's been having a great time swapping languages in conversations with the people we've met. Haifa has a lot of Russians. But he was looking forward to Tsfat, where the very religious Jews are said to speak Yiddish.

So yesterday when we arrived in Tsfat, he approached a young Hasidic man and greeted him in Yiddish. The guy gave Bob a sort of blank look and then replied in a Southern drawl. He was from North Carolina. So we sat down for coffee and were approached by another very religious guy, but when Bob spoke to him in Yiddish...he was an American, too. Finally, while we were looking at a map, a very nice woman asked us if we needed directions. She was from Washington, DC. So we had to settle for wandering around the very picturesque town, which is seemingly filled with Americans.

But today we accomplished at least one item on Bob's bucket list: He put his feet in the Sea of Galilee:

We also wandered around Beit She'an, the best preserved Roman town in Israel.

But we're reluctantly saying farewell to the north of Israel and driving south to the Negev tomorrow. There, Bob is hoping to complete his quest by putting his feet in the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aquaba. And I'm hoping to ride camels out into the desert.